Search Abandonment Costs E-Commerce $300 Billion Per Year. Google Thinks It Can Help

Search abandonment — when a consumer searches for a product then leaves the site before clicking through the results — is a costly problem for retailers. Today, Google Cloud is announcing a new tool aimed at the problem. Built on Google’s understanding of user intent and context, Google Cloud Retail Search provides retailers with Google-quality search on their own digital properties and websites. To support the tool’s introduction, Google commissioned the Harris Poll to conduct a survey of over 200 retail website managers and 10,000 global consumers who have used the search function on a retail website in the past six months. According to the query, search abandonment is costing retailers more than $300 billion annually in the U.S. A majority of website managers (88 percent) say abandoned searches are a problem at their company. Similarly, 94 percent of global consumers received irrelevant results while searching on a retailer’s website in the last six months, and 85 percent say they view a brand differently after experiencing search difficulties. Read more at Inc.